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Albert Petrov, Jose Roberto Nascimento and Paulo Porfirio

Introduction to Modified Gravity

2nd ed. 2023
Albert Petrov
Departamento de Fisica, Federal University of Paraíba,
João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil

Jose Roberto Nascimento

Departamento de Fisica, Federal University of Paraíba,
João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil

Paulo Porfirio
Departamento de Fisica, Federal University of Paraíba,
João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil

ISSN 2191-5423 e-ISSN 2191-5431

SpringerBriefs in Physics
ISBN 978-3-031-46633-5 e-ISBN 978-3-031-46634-2
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46634-2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer

Nature Switzerland AG 1st edition: © The Author(s), under
exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020,
2023

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and

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Preface
In this book, we review various modifications of the
Einstein gravity, First, we consider theories where only the
purely geometric sector is changed. Second, we review
scalar-tensor gravities. Third, we examine vector-tensor
gravity models and the problem of Lorentz symmetry
breaking in a curved space-time. Fourth, we present some
results for the Horava-Lifshitz gravity. Fifth, we consider
nonlocal extensions for gravity. Also, we give some
comments on non-Riemannian gravity theories. We close
the book with the discussion of perspectives of modified
gravity.
The authors are grateful to Profs. B. Altschul, M. Gomes,
T. Mariz, G. Olmo, E. Passos, M. Rebouças, A. F. Santos, A.
J. da Silva, and J. B. Fonseca-Neto (in memoriam), for
fruitful collaboration and interesting discussions. The work
has been partially supported by CNPq.
Albert Petrov
Jose Roberto Nascimento
Paulo Porfirio
João Pessoa, Brazil
Contents
1 Einstein Gravity and the Need for Its Modification
2 Modifications of the Purely Geometric Sector
2.​1 Motivations
2.2 -Gravity
2.3 -Gravity
2.​4 Functions of Other Curvature Invariants
2.​5 Comments on Massive Gravity
2.​6 Conclusions
3 Scalar-Tensor Gravities
3.​1 General Review
3.​2 Chern-Simons Modified Gravity
3.​2.​1 The Four-Dimensional Chern-Simons
Modified Gravity Action
3.​2.​2 Classical Solutions
3.​2.​3 Perturbative Generation
3.​3 Brans-Dicke Gravity
3.​4 Galileons
3.​5 Conclusions
4 Vector-Tensor Gravities and Problem of Lorentz
Symmetry Breaking in Gravity
4.​1 Introduction and Motivations
4.​2 Einstein-Aether Gravity
4.​3 Bumblebee Gravity
 4.​4 Comments on Linearized Lorentz-Breaking
Terms in Gravity
4.​5 Conclusions
5 Horava-Lifshitz Gravity
5.​1 Introduction
5.​2 Basic Definitions
5.​3 Exact Solutions
5.​4 Modified Versions of HL Gravity
5.​5 Conclusions
6 Nonlocal Gravity
6.​1 Motivations
6.​2 Some Results in Non-gravitational Nonlocal
Theories
6.​3 Classical Solutions in Nonlocal Gravity Models
6.​4 Conclusions
7 Comments on Non-Riemannian Gravity
7.​1 Introduction
7.​2 Metric-Affine Geometrical Tools
7.​3 Fermions in a Riemann-Cartan Space
7.​3.​1 General Definitions
7.​3.​2 One-Loop Induced Nieh-Yan Topological
Term
7.​4 Metric-Affine Bumblebee Model
7.​4.​1 Field Equations
7.​4.​2 Spinor Sector and Spontaneous Lorentz
Symmetry Breaking
 7.​4.​3 One-Loop Divergent Contributions to the
Fermionic Effective Action
7.​5 Conclusions
8 Summary
References
Index
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland
AG 2023
A. Petrov et al., Introduction to Modified Gravity, SpringerBriefs in Physics
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46634-2_1

1. Einstein Gravity and the Need

for Its Modification
Albert Petrov1 , Jose Roberto Nascimento1 and
Paulo Porfirio1
(1) Departamento de Fisica, Federal University of Paraíba,
João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil

Albert Petrov (Corresponding author)

Email: petrov@fisica.ufpb.br

Jose Roberto Nascimento

Email: jroberto@fisica.ufpb.br

Paulo Porfirio
Email: pporfirio@fisica.ufpb.br

General relativity (GR) is clearly one of the most successful

physical theories. Being formulated as a natural
development of special relativity, it has made a number of
fundamental physical predictions which have been
confirmed experimentally with a very high degree of
precision. Among these predictions, a special role is played
by expansion of the Universe and precession of Mercure
perihelion, which have been proved many years ago, while
other important claims of GR, such as gravitational waves
and black holes, have been confirmed through direct
observations only recently (an excellent review of various
experimental tests of gravity can be found in [1]).
By its concept, GR is an essentially geometric theory. Its
key idea consists in the fact that the gravitational field
manifests itself through modifications of the space-time
geometry. Thus, one can develop a general theory of
gravity where the fields characterizing geometry, that is,
metric and connection, become dynamical variables so that
a nontrivial space can be described in terms of curvature,
torsion and non-metricity. It has been argued in [2] that
there are eight types of geometry characterized by
possibilities of zero or non-zero curvature tensor, torsion
and so-called homothetic curvature tensor, with all these
objects constructed on the base of metric and connection.
Nevertheless, the most used formulation of gravity is based
on the (pseudo-)Riemannian approach where the
connection is symmetric and completely characterized by
the metric. Within this book, we concentrate namely on the
(pseudo-)Riemannian description of gravity where the
action is characterized by functions of geometric invariants
constructed on the basis of the metric (i.e. various
contractions of Riemann curvature tensor, its covariant
derivatives and a metric), and possibly some extra fields,
scalar or vector ones, and only in Chap. 7 we discuss
theories of gravity defined on a non-Riemannian manifold.
So, let us introduce some basic definitions of quantities
used within the Riemannian approach.
By definition, the infinitesimal line element in curved
spaces is defined as . The metric tensor
is considered as the only independent dynamical
variable in our theory. As usual, the action must be a
(Riemannian) scalar, and for the first step, it is assumed to
involve no more than the second derivatives of the metric
tensor, in the whole analogy with other field theory models
where the action involves only up to the second derivatives.
The unique scalar involving only second derivatives is a
scalar curvature R (throughout the book, we follow the
definitions and conventions from the book [3] except for
special cases):

(1.1)

where are the Christoffel symbols, that is, affine

connections expressed in terms of the metric tensor as

(1.2)

The Einstein–Hilbert action is obtained as an integral from

the scalar curvature over the D-dimensional space-time:

(1.3)

where g is the determinant of the metric. We assume the

signature to be . The is the gravitational
constant (it is important to note that its mass dimension in
D-dimensional space-time is equal to , but within this
book we concentrate on the usual case );
nevertheless, in some cases we will define it to be equal to
1. The is the matter Lagrangian.
Varying the action with respect to the metric tensor, we
obtain the Einstein equations:

(1.4)

where is the energy-momentum tensor of the matter.

The conservation of the energy-momentum tensor
presented by the condition is clearly consistent
with the Bianchi identities .
One should emphasize several most important solutions
of these equations for the four-dimensional space-time. The
first one is the Schwarzschild metric, which solves the
vacuum Einstein equations, , and describes the
simplest black hole with mass M. The corresponding space-
time line element looks like

(1.5)

Actually, this metric is a particular case of the more

generic static spherically symmetric metric (SSSM).
The second one is the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker
(FRW) metric describing the simplest (homogeneous and
isotropic) cosmological solution whose line element is

(1.6)

where a(t) is the scale factor, and for positive,

zero and negative curvature, respectively. The matter, in
this case, is given by the relativistic perfect fluid:
(1.7)
where is the matter density, is the 4-velocity of a
point-particle of the matter and p is its pressure; in many
cases, one employs the equation of state , with
being a constant characterizing the kind of the matter.
Besides these solutions, an important example is
represented also by the Gödel metric with the line element
[4]:

(1.8)

which, just as the FRW metric, solves Einstein equations

supported by the fluid-like matter source, i.e.
(1.9)
but in this case one has , and .
Namely, these solutions and their direct generalizations
will be considered within our book.
 An important generalization of the Gödel metric is the
(cylindrically symmetric) class of Gödel-type metrics
defined in [5]:
(1.10)
where the following conditions of space-time homogeneity
are assumed:

(1.11)

with and m being constants. This metric will be

considered within our book in different modified gravity
models. The interesting special case of this metric
corresponding to , discussed in great detail in [5],
is called the Rebouças-Tiomno (RT) metric. Following the
methodology described in [5], we consider three cases of H
and D consistent with the conditions of space-time
homogeneity of the metric (1.11):
(i) hyperbolic, , ;
(ii) trigonometric, , ;
;
(iii) linear, , .
Repeating the argumentation from [5], one immediately
sees that for , there is a non-causal region
with , where , while at ,
causality violation does not occur, and at ,
there is an infinite sequence of causal and non-causal
regions.
Now, let us make an introduction to quantum gravity.
Indeed, it is natural to expect that gravity, in a whole
analogy with electrodynamics and other field theories, must
be quantized. To do it, one can follow the approach
developed by ’t Hooft and Veltman [6, 7]. We start with
splitting of the dynamic metric into a sum of the
background part and the quantum fluctuation :
 (1.12)
where the is introduced to change the mass dimension of
to 1. As a result, the action can be expanded in infinite
power series in . For the first step, we can choose the
flat background, i.e. . The lowest, quadratic
contribution to the Lagrangian of is

(1.13)

where the indices of are raised and lowered with the

flat Minkowski metric. The Lagrangian (1.13) is called
the Fierz-Pauli Lagrangian; it is used in constructing some
generalizations of gravity.
The corresponding (second-order) equations of motion
are actually the linearized Einstein equations:

(1.14)

The action is invariant with respect to linearized gauge

transformations ; also, the linearized
Bianchi identities take place. As a consequence,
afterwards one must fix the gauge, which can be done by
adding the term

(1.15)

where , so one has a new Lagrangian

(1.16)

which can be rewritten as

(1.17)
where , which implies the
following propagator in the momentum space:

(1.18)

where D is the space-time dimension (the singularity at

reflects the fact that the Einstein–Hilbert
action is a pure surface term).
Now, let us expand the Einstein–Hilbert action (1.3) in
power series in by making again the substitution (1.12)
but with the arbitrary background . In this case, the
metric determinant and curvature scalar are expanded
up to the second order in h as (cf. [6, 7])

(1.19)

where , etc. and the covariant derivative, Ricci

scalar and tensor and other objects with the bar above are
constructed on the base of the background metric.
Also, we must introduce the Faddeev-Popov (FP)
ghosts whose Lagrangian looks like [6]
(1.20)
where , are the ghosts. The expansion of the
curvature scalar given by (1.19) together with the ghost
action (1.20) is sufficient for the one-loop calculations. If
one adds the coupling of the gravity to the scalar matter
(which is further integrated out), through the Lagrangian
, the following paradigmatic result
for the one-loop counterterm arising in the purely
gravitational sector [6, 7] can be found, within the
dimensional regularization in D-dimensional space-time:

(1.21)

This result will be used in the next chapter to formulate the

simplest renormalizable gravity model.
Returning to the classical aspects of gravity, we note
again that many predictions of GR were confirmed
experimentally, including, on the one side, the expansion of
the Universe (which is discussed now in any textbook on
GR, for example, in [3]), and, on the another side, the
existence of gravitational waves whose detection within the
LIGO-Virgo experiments was reported in [8]. In this
context, it is worth to mention also obtaining the image of
the shadow of a black hole with the use of the Event
Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations [9], which played a
fundamental role within the studies of black holes.
Nevertheless, it turns out that there are problems which
cannot be solved by GR itself, so, the theory of gravity
requires some modifications. Actually, there are two most
important difficulties which GR faced. The first one is
related with the quantum description of gravity—indeed,
the gravitational constant has a negative mass
dimension, precisely equal to in D-dimensional
space-time; thus, the four-dimensional Einstein–Hilbert
gravity is non-renormalizable, i.e. its consistent description
must involve an infinite number of counterterms (an
excellent review on quantum calculations in gravity is
presented in the book [10]). The second difficulty consists
in the fact that the cosmic acceleration whose discovery
was reported in [11] has not been predicted theoretically
since it does not admit explanations within GR.
Therefore, the problem of possible modifications of
gravity arises naturally. Actually, although the first
attempts to introduce modified gravity have been carried
out much earlier, the detection of gravitational waves [8]
and obtaining the image of a black hole [9] strongly
increased attention to modified gravity models.
The simplest attempt to solve the cosmic acceleration
problem is based on introducing the cosmological constant
, i.e. we add to the action (1.3) the extra term
, so, in the l.h.s. of (1.4), the additive
term (or, as is the same, the extra term in the
r.h.s.) will arise. It is easy to see that for the FRW metric,
the components of the Ricci tensor and the scalar curvature
in spherical coordinates, at , are

(1.22)

In this scenario, the (00) component of Einstein equations,

together with the equation obtained from the combination
of (ii) and (00) components, with and , yield

(1.23)

where for positive, zero and negative scalar

curvature. As is well known, originally was introduced by
Einstein in order to provide a static solution, but further de
Sitter proved that the empty space with positive will
expand exponentially (indeed, in this case, for , one
easily finds , and the Hubble parameter
is a constant). As a consequence, after the discovery
of the cosmic acceleration, the idea of the cosmological
constant has been revitalized [12]. However, the
cosmological constant, by astronomical observations,
should be extremely small (about 120 orders less than a
natural scale for it given by , where ,
in gravitational units, is the Planck mass), and this fact has
no theoretical reason (the search for this explanation
constitutes the famous cosmological constant problem
[12]). Besides, the cosmological constant does not solve the
problem of renormalizability of gravity.
There are two manners on how to extend the gravity in
order to solve these problems. Within the first approach,
we modify the Einstein–Hilbert action by introducing
additive terms. Within the second approach, we suggest
that the full description of gravity involves, besides the
metric field, also some extra scalar or vector fields which
must not be confused with matter being treated as
ingredients of the gravity itself, so that usual results of GR
are recovered, for example, when these fields are constant
(the typical example is the Brans-Dicke gravity which we
discuss further). In this review, we give a description of
these approaches. It should be noted that among these
approaches, an important role is played by adding new
geometrical terms (and/or fields) aimed either to break the
Lorentz/CPT symmetry or to introduce a supersymmetric
extension of gravity. Within this review we also discuss
these approaches.
The structure of this book is as follows. In Chap. 2, we
present various models obtained through the modifications
of the purely geometric sector. In Chap. 3, we consider
various scalar-tensor gravity models, such as Chern-Simons
and Brans-Dicke gravities, and galileons. In Chap. 4, we
discuss vector-tensor gravity models and the problem of
Lorentz symmetry breaking in gravity. In Chap. 5, we
review the most interesting results in Horava-Lifshitz
gravity. In Chap. 6, we present some results for nonlocal
gravity. In Chap. 7, we give some general comments on the
non-Riemannian geometry and then address two particular
modified theories of gravity on non-Riemannian manifolds.
Chapter 8 represents conclusions of our book.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland
AG 2023
A. Petrov et al., Introduction to Modified Gravity, SpringerBriefs in Physics
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46634-2_2

2. Modifications of the Purely

Geometric Sector
Albert Petrov1 , Jose Roberto Nascimento1 and
Paulo Porfirio1
(1) Departamento de Fisica, Federal University of Paraíba,
João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil

Albert Petrov (Corresponding author)

Email: petrov@fisica.ufpb.br

Jose Roberto Nascimento

Email: jroberto@fisica.ufpb.br

Paulo Porfirio
Email: pporfirio@fisica.ufpb.br

2.1 Motivations
As we already noted in the Introduction, one of the ways to
modify gravity consists in introducing additional terms to
the geometric sector. Such terms are given by scalars
constructed on the base of the metric tensor, i.e. these
scalars are functions of the Riemann tensor, the Ricci
tensor, possibly, their covariant derivatives, and the scalar
curvature. In the simplest case the Lagrangian is the
function of the scalar curvature only, so, the action is
(2.1)
where, f(R) is a some function of the scalar curvature.
Since the Einstein gravity is very well observationally
confirmed, and the curvature of the Universe is known to
be small, it is natural to suggest that , with
, where is a small constant parameter, so that
Einstein-Hilbert term dominates. The case is very
interesting by various reasons, from power-counting
renormalizability to the possibility of cosmic acceleration,
so, it will be discussed in details. However, other values of
n, including even negative ones which called attention
recently, are also interesting. Another generalization of this
action is the suggestion that the Lagrangian depends also
on invariants and , such class of
theories is called f(R, Q, P) gravity, the paradigmatic
example of such theories is the Weyl gravity (see f.e. [13,
14] and references therein), where the Lagrangian includes
the square of the Weyl tensor, in D dimensions given by

(2.2)

satisfying the zero trace condition . Besides of

these situations, it is interesting also to abandon the
restriction for the space-time to be four-dimensional. In this
context we will consider also higher-dimensional space-
times and discuss Lovelock gravities whose action involves
higher curvature invariants.

2.2 -Gravity
Let us start with the action
(2.3)
A simple comparison of this expression with (1.​19) shows
that this action is of the second order in curvatures, i.e. of
fourth order in derivatives, therefore the theory described
by this action is called -gravity. In principle, one can add
also the square of the Riemann tensor, however, since in
the four-dimensional space-time the Gauss-Bonnet term
is a total derivative, the
square of the Riemann tensor in is not independent.
We see that the additive term in this action exactly
matches the structure of the one-loop divergence arising in
the pure Einstein gravity (1.​21). Therefore, the theory (2.3)
is one-loop renormalizable. Moreover, it is not difficult to
show that no other divergences arise in the theory. Here,
we demonstrate it in the manner similar to that one used
within the background field method for the super-Yang-
Mills theory [15]. Indeed, the propagator in this theory
behaves as . Any vertex involves no more than four
derivatives. Integration over internal momentum in any
loop yields the factor 4, hence formally the superficial
degree of divergence must be .
However, we should take into account that this is the upper
limit for , and each derivative acting to the external legs
instead of the propagator decreases by 1. Since , as
well as the Ricci tensor, involves second derivatives, each
external , , R decreases the by 2. Hence, the
or contributions will display only logarithmic
divergences, and higher-order contributions like will
yield being thus superficially finite. The presence of
Faddeev-Popov (FP) ghosts evidently does not jeopardize
this conclusion.
Let us discuss various aspects of the theory (2.3). We
follow the argumentation presented in [16, 17]. First, one
can write down the equations of motion:
 (2.4)

Using these equations, one can find the Newtonian static

limit of the theory. Proceeding in the same way as in GR,
we can show that the gravitational potential in the non-
relativistic limit is

(2.5)

where , and . So,

we find that the -gravity involves massive modes
displaying Yukawa-like contributions to the potential.
Following the estimations from [16], the are about
. We note that the Birkhoff theorem is no more
valid in this theory since there are mass-like parameters
, , and instead of the Bianchi identities one will have
.
Then, it is interesting to discuss cosmological solutions
in this theory. A remarkable feature of the -gravity
consists in the fact that it was the first gravity model to
predict accelerated expansion of the Universe much before
its observational discovery. The pioneer role was played by
the paper [18], where terms of higher orders in curvature
generated by some anomaly have been introduced to the
equation of motion, so the resulting equation, for the
vacuum, looks like

(2.6)
where are constants. Many terms in the r.h.s. of this
equation are present also in (2.4), actually, at and
these equations coincide up to some numerical
coefficients, so, their solutions are not very different.
Substituting the FRW metric into (2.6), we arrive at

(2.7)

where , , with , effectively H

plays the role of the Hubble constant. In this case one has
the very simple form for the Ricci tensor: .
The solution of (2.7) was explicitly obtained in [18]
where it was found that the de Sitter-like solution is
possible, with the scale factor given by ,
or , or , for closed, flat and
open Universe respectively. So, we see that accelerating
solution is possible in this theory, just as in the presence of
the cosmological term. Moreover, it is clear that a wide
class of models involving higher orders in curvatures will
admit accelerated solutions as well. This result called
interest to f(R) gravity displaying it to be a possible
candidate for a consistent explanation of cosmic
acceleration. Afterwards, many cosmological solutions for
various versions of the function f(R) were obtained and
observationally tested, some of these results will be
discussed in the next section.
Now, let us discuss the problem of degrees of freedom in
-gravity. First of all, we note that there is a common
difficulty characteristic for higher-derivative theories,
either gravitational or not. Indeed, in any Lorentz-invariant
theory with four derivatives, the propagator will be
proportional to the momentum depending factor looking
like:

(2.8)

where is the energy scale at which the higher

derivatives become important. It is clear that we can
rewrite this factor as

(2.9)

Therefore we see that this propagator actually describes

two distinct degrees of freedom, the massive and the
massless one. Moreover, these two contributions to the
propagator have opposite signs (otherwise, if signs of these
contributions are the same, the UV behavior of the
propagator is not improved). Clearly it means that the
Hamiltonian describing these two degrees of freedom is
composed by two terms with opposite signs:

(2.10)

We see that the energy is not bounded from below, hence,

we cannot define a vacuum in the theory consistently, i.e.
one can take energy from the system without any
limitations, as from a well without a bottom. Moreover,
actually it means that the spectrum of the theory describes
free particles with negative energy which seems to be
nonsense from the viewpoint of the common sense. Actually
this is the simplest example of the so-called Ostrogradsky
instability plaguing higher-derivative field theory models
except of special cases, see a detailed discussion of this
example and similar situations in [19]; a profound
discussion of difficulties arising within the Hamiltonian
formulation of these theories is given also in [20].
Moreover, in some cases the higher-derivative theories
involve not only ghosts but even tachyons, for a specific
sign of the higher-derivative term. Therefore the higher-
derivative models including the -gravity are treated as
effective theories aimed for description of the low-energy
dynamics of the theory (roughly speaking, for the square of
momentum much less than the characteristic mass square
). However, it is necessary to note that higher-
derivative terms naturally emerge as quantum corrections
after the integration over some matter fields, see f.e. [21],
so, the presence of higher-derivative terms within the
effective dynamics in many field theory models including
gravity is natural.
Within our -gravity model, the presence of ghosts can
be illustrated as follows. If one will extract only physical
degrees of freedom, whose role is played by transverse-
traceless parts of spatial components of the metric
fluctuation, expanded as , and scalar fields,
one will see that the quadratic action will look like [17]

(2.11)

where is a trace part of . We see that

here, and behave as two degrees of freedom, with
one of them is massive and another is massless, and their
signs are opposite. Hence, the ghost contributions emerge
naturally. We see that the number of degrees of freedom is
increased, besides of tensor modes we have also scalar
ones, and each of them is contributed by usual and ghost
ones (the contribution for the scalar can be also split
into usual and ghost parts).
Clearly, the natural question is—whether is it possible to
deal with ghosts or even avoid their presence? There are
several answers to this question. One approach is based on
extracting so-called “benign” ghosts whose contribution
can be controlled [22, 23]. Another approach is based on
considering the theory where the propagator has a form of
the primitive monomial rather than the product of
monomials as in (2.8). The simplest manner to do it
consists in treating of the Lagrangian involving only higher-
derivative term with no usual two-derivative one. Within
the gravity context it means that one introduces the so-
called pure gravity (sometimes referred as
“agravity” [24]) where the usual Einstein-Hilbert term is
absent. This theory was introduced in [24] and got its
further development in [25], with its action can be treated
as the special limit of gravity: ,
with . The propagator will be proportional to

(2.12)

with , the is the usual transverse

projector, and is a coefficient at . One can show that
on the flat background, only scalar mode propagates [25].
It is clear that there is no ghosts in this theory (in [25] it is
also argued with analysis of degrees of freedom). It is
interesting to note that the Breit potential for this
propagator displays confining behavior:

(2.13)

So, this theory has only one difficulty—it does not yield
Einstein-Hilbert limit which was tested through many
observations. Many aspects of the pure -gravity are
discussed in [26–29], see also references therein.

2.3 f(R)-Gravity
Clearly, the natural development of the idea of gravity
will consist in the suggestion that the classical action can
involve not only second but any degree (involving
negative!) of the scalar curvature. Thus, the concept of f(R)
gravity was introduced. Its action is given by (2.1), with
.
First of all, we can discuss the renormalizability of this
theory along the same lines as in the previous section. It is
easy to see that the term proportional to (or, which is
similar, to N-th degree or Riemann or Ricci tensors) is
characterized by the degree of divergence , in the four-
dimensional space-time given by
(2.14)
Immediately we see that now discussion of the
renormalizability is more involved than for (the
similar situation occurs for Horava-Lifshitz-like theories
where increasing of the critical exponent z implies in
growing not only of degree of momentum in the
denominator of the propagator but also of numbers of
derivatives in vertices). Actually, for any one should
classify possible divergences with various values of N for
the given n. Many examples of quantum calculations in
theories for various n, as well as in other higher-derivative
gravity theories, including studies of one-loop divergences
and running couplings are presented in [10], see also
references therein. It is clear that the ghosts will arise for
any polynomial form of f(R) just as in the case of -
gravity, so, conceptually the quantum calculations for
and for do not differ essentially (for discussion of
renormalizability aspects of f(R) gravity, see also [30]; also,
in [31] the renormalizability of a higher-derivative gravity
is argued with use of the BRST symmetry).
The main line of study of f(R) gravity consists in a
detailed investigation of its classical, especially
cosmological aspects. The modified Einstein equations in
this case look like

(2.15)

It is evident that the de Sitter/anti-de Sitter (dS/adS)

space-times will be vacuum solutions of these equations
yielding , with b being a constant. Then, to
study the cosmological aspects, we can use the expressions
for components of the Ricci tensor and the scalar curvature
(1.​22). In a whole analogy with (2.7) one can find that, if
the f(R) involves term, the corresponding cosmological
equation, up to dimensionless factors, will be

(2.16)

where H is the constant, accompanying the term, cf.

(2.7), and M is the energy scale accompanying the higher
curvature term. The dots in parentheses are for other terms
with 2n time derivatives (if they are all homogeneous,
involving the same degrees of a in the numerator and in the
denominator). It can be shown (see f.e. [20] and references
therein), that in this theory, for any the solutions are
again presented by hyperbolic sine and cosine and
exponential, just as in case [18]. We conclude that this
theory describes well the inflationary epoch where the
curvature of the Universe was large hence the higher-
derivative contributions are important. In principle, in this
earlier epoch one can use the action introduced in the
manner of [25, 26] where the Einstein-Hilbert term is
suppressed, and one chooses as a reasonable
approximation. At the same time, an interesting problem is
—how one can adopt the form of the f(R) to explain the
actual accelerated expansion of the Universe, in the case
where the curvature is very close to zero, so, terms with
can be disregarded.
In [32], a bold departure from usual forms of the f(R)
function was proposed: this function was suggested to be

(2.17)

This model is sometimes referred as 1/R gravity. The

quantum description of this theory near the flat
background is problematic. However, it can be treated
perturbatively in principle near some other background.
Let us discuss the equations of motion for this choice of
f(R). In the vacuum case ( ), we have

(2.18)

For the constant scalar curvature, one finds

(2.19)

this is, (a)dS solution, and in the case of the negative sign,
at we indeed have an acceleration [20], so, this model
allows to explain accelerated expansion for the constant
curvature case.
Unfortunately, this model suffers from a tachyonic
instability. Indeed, after taking the trace of (2.18) we find

(2.20)

After we make a perturbation around an accelerated

solution described by a constant negative curvature, i.e.
, we find that the obeys the equation

(2.21)
and in our signature this equation describes a
tachyon. Actually, this instability is very weak since is
expected to be very small, for the consistency with
observations, hence the first term in this equation is highly
suppressed. It should be noted that for a non-zero density
of the matter the instability is much worse, but adding the
term into the action improves radically the situation
[20]. Therefore this model was naturally treated as one of
candidates for solving the dark energy problem. However,
the model (2.17), in further works, was discussed mostly
within the cosmological context (see also a discussion of
asymptotic behavior of cosmological solutions in [32]).
Let us note some more issues related to f(R) gravity.
First, it was argued in [20] that the f(R) gravity model is
equivalent to a some scalar-tensor gravity. Indeed, let us
for the first step define , so is a
correcting term. Then, we introduce an auxiliary scalar
field . Since this equation relates R and , it
can be solved, so one obtains a dependence . As a
next step, the potential looking like
(2.22)
implying , is defined. As a result, the
Lagrangian (2.1) turns out to be equivalent to
(2.23)
Then, we carry out the conformal transformation of the
metric:

(2.24)

therefore the Lagrangian is rewritten as

(2.25)
Therefore, the f(R) gravity turns out to be equivalent to the
general relativity with the extra scalar, i.e. to the scalar-
tensor gravity. The form of the potential is therefore
related with the form of the function f(R).
Clearly, the natural question is about the possibility to
obtain other important gravitational solutions within the
f(R) gravity context. First, for the Gödel metric (1.​8), as
well as for its straightforward generalization, that is, the
Gödel-type metric (1.​10), the scalar curvature is constant,
hence the equations (2.15) are simplified drastically since
the term involving covariant derivatives of f(R) goes away,
and the l.h.s. of these equations turns out to be a mere
combination of constants. As we already noted, it was
shown in [33] that both noncausal solutions, with
, and causal ones, f.e. those ones with
(i.e. the RT metric with is causal), are
possible in this theory, with f(R) is an arbitrary function of
the scalar curvature, while to achieve causality, it is not
sufficient to have only a relativistic fluid as in [4], and one
must add as well a scalar matter—one should remind that
since the Einstein equations are nonlinear, the solution
generated by a sum of two sources is not equal to the sum
of solutions generated by each source. As for the black
holes, we strongly recommend the excellent book [34]
where Schwarzschild-type BH solutions in f(R) gravity are
considered, see also [35] and references therein.
In [34], a wide spectrum of possible generalizations of
f(R) gravity was discussed, such as and f(R, T)
models, where is the matter Lagrangian, and T is the
trace of the energy-momentum tensor. However, within our
study we will pursue another aim—we will suggest that the
matter is coupled to the gravity in the usual form while the
free gravity action depends on other scalars constructed on
the base of the Riemann tensor and metric. This will be the
subject of the next section.

2.4 Functions of Other Curvature

Invariants
Let us suggest that instead of the function of the scalar
curvature only, we have also functions of other scalars.
There are many examples of studies of such models, so we
discuss only some most interesting ones, the f(R, Q) and
f(R, Q, P) gravities, the Lovelock gravity and the Gauss-
Bonnet gravity. We note that, unlike the f(R) gravity, these
theories in general cannot be reduced to the scalar-tensor
form where the Lagrangian is a sum of a term linear in the
scalar curvature and a curvature-independent term
depending on some extra scalar field.
We start our discussion from the f(R, Q) gravity. In this
theory, the Lagrangian is a function not only of the scalar
curvature, but also of , so,

(2.26)

The equations of motion are found to look like [36, 37]

(2.27)

where , , and is the energy-momentum

tensor of the matter.
As an example, we consider the Gödel-type metric (1.​
10). One can show, that, unlike general relativity, such
solutions are possible not only for dust but also for the
vacuum (with non-zero cosmological constant), in
particular, completely causal vacuum solutions are present
[37]. Clearly, the solutions of this form are possible also for
the presence of the matter given by the relativistic fluid
and a scalar field. Again, as in [33], all Einstein equations
will take the form of purely algebraic relations between
density, pressure, field amplitude and constants from the
gravity Lagrangian. As for the cosmological metric, the
possibility of accelerating solutions can be shown just in
the same manner as in the previous sections. Among other
possible solutions in f(R, Q) gravity, it is worth to mention
Reissner-Nordström black holes [38] and wormholes [39].
Further generalization of this theory would consist in
consideration of function not only of R and Q, but also of
, with study of the corresponding theory
called f(R, Q, P) gravity is in principle not more difficult,
see f.e. [40, 41]. One of subclasses of such theories is
represented by so-called theories, where is the
Gauss-Bonnet invariant,
(2.28)
whose contribution to the classical action yields a total
derivative in the four-dimensional space-time. The
theories have been treated mostly within the cosmological
context (see f.e. [42]).
Returning to more generic f(R, Q, P) theories, we note
that in the paper [41], the consistency of the Gödel-type
metrics in this class of theories has been studied for
various examples of the function f(R, Q, P). For example,
one of interesting cases is
, with g(z) is a some function of z, f.e. . In this
situation, the RT metric [5], that is, the Gödel-type metric
characterized by the relation , was shown to be
consistent with the modified Einstein equations, in the
vacuum case, for certain relation between the vorticity
and the theory parameters a, b, c. The cases with nontrivial
matter sources also can yield completely causal solutions,
for certain relations between the parameters of the theory.
One more interesting example of modification of the
purely geometric sector is presented by the so-called Ricci-
inverse gravity [43]. Its action looks like

(2.29)

where , with is the inverse Ricci

tensor. This model can be treated as a further development
of the 1/R gravity [32] discussed above. The f(R, A) is an
arbitrary function of R and A, in the simplest case,
. Within [43], the Ricci-inverse gravity
has been considered within the cosmological context, and
the possibility of accelerated solution was proved (the
simplest example noted in [43] is: , so,
the Hubble parameter , that is, the de Sitter
solution with ). Certainly, other, non-cosmological
solutions in this model can be studied as well.
Now, let us make the next step—suggest that the
dimension of the space-time is not restricted to be four but
can be arbitrary. This step allows us to introduce
the Lovelock gravity. Its key idea is as follows.
Let us consider the gravity model defined in the space-
time of an arbitrary dimension [44], called the Lovelock
gravity:

(2.30)

Here are some constants possessing nontrivial

dimensions. It is natural to suggest that they, up to some
dimensionless numbers, are given by various degrees of the
gravitational constant. Each term with 2n derivatives is
topological, i.e. it represents itself as a total derivative at
 , and identical zero in minor dimensions. We note
that there is no higher derivatives of the metric in the
action. This action is characterized the following properties
displayed by the Einstein-Hilbert action: (i) the tensor ,
the l.h.s. of the corresponding equations of motion, is
symmetric; (ii) the covariant divergence of vanishes;
(iii) the is linear in second derivatives of the metric.
The general form of the term with 2n derivatives in the
Lagrangian contributing to (2.30) can be presented as [45]:

(2.31)

where the 2n-order Kronecker-like delta symbol is

(2.32)

It is easy to check that at , we have the scalar

curvature, and at , the Gauss-Bonnet term. The term
with is naturally treated as the cosmological constant.
As a result, we can write down the action;

(2.33)

Here, zero order is for , first—for R, second—for . The

are some numbers, and is a length scale, f.e. Planck
length, it is given by in where the has a
dimension of inverse length.
The l.h.s. of the modified Einstein equations looks like
[45]
(2.34)
It is clear that , is
the usual Einstein tensor. The r.h.s. of the modified
Einstein equations is not modified within this approach, so
we have .
It turns out to be that although the l.h.s. (2.34) of the
modified Einstein equations is very complicated, these
equations admit some exact solutions for an arbitrary
space-time dimension, i.e. for the presence of terms with
very high orders in curvatures. The most interesting cases
are the maximally symmetric (anti) de Sitter space and the
FRW cosmological metric.
In the (a)dS space, the Riemann curvature tensor is
given by

(2.35)

with is a some number. In this case the vacuum equation

yields , with , and this
equation possesses some roots for (in general complex
ones). Each value of allows to find the corresponding
scalar curvature.
We can solve the modified Einstein equations also for
the FRW metric (1.​6):

(2.36)

defining , where as usual , the

indices i, j, k, l take values 1, 2, 3, so that the l.h.s. of
modified Einstein equations yields

(2.37)
For the vacuum ( ) one immediately finds
which implies exponential expansion. For the fluid, also
there are hyperbolic and trigonometric solutions. So, we
conclude that the Lovelock gravity is consistent with
accelerating expansion of the Universe.
Concerning the general Lovelock theory, it must be
noted that already third-order contributions to the action,
those ones with six derivatives, imply very complicated
equations of motion. The explicit expressions for initial
terms of Lovelock Lagrangians up to fifteenth order (for
which, the whole expression involves tens of millions of
terms) can be found in [46].
Now, let us discuss the Gauss-Bonnet gravity in the
arbitrary spacetime dimension, that is, the theory with the
action

(2.38)

The equations of motion of this theory are

(2.39)

with . As a simple example, we discuss the

solution of this equation in the braneworld case, i.e. we
consider the five-dimensional metric
(2.40)
where we suggest that the indices vary from 0 to 4,
while a, b—from 0 to 3, and y is the extra (fourth) spacial
coordinate, and A(y) is called the warp factor [47, 48]. In
[49], these equations have been solved for the case when
the matter is given by the scalar field , so,
, and , for the
simplified situation . Explicitly, for
positive , the solution is

(2.41)

and for the negative —in the form

(2.42)

In principle, there are more situations when the modified

Einstein equations in the Gauss-Bonnet gravity can be
solved. We note that the braneworld solutions could be
found not only for Gauss-Bonnet gravity but for other
gravity models including the already discussed f(R) gravity,
where both constant and nonconstant scalar curvature
solutions were obtained (see f.e. [50, 51] and references
therein), however, we do not discuss the details of
braneworld solutions here because of the restricted volume
of this review.

2.5 Comments on Massive Gravity

In a full analogy with the vector field theory, where the
Proca Lagrangian is introduced as a generalization of the
Maxwell one, one more natural extension of the Einstein
gravity consists in constructing its massive analogue.1 For
the first step, we consider the linearized case described by
the Fierz-Pauli Lagrangian (1.​13), and add to it the
simplest massive term [52]:

(2.43)
and the relative coefficient between two terms is
chosen in order to avoid arising of additional modes, in
particular, ghost ones.
Some discussions of this term are presented in [52].
Among various conclusions, it is argued there that, first,
the complete linearized massive gravity action given by the
sum of (1.​13) and (2.43) describes the massive field with
spin 2, with no dynamical spin-0 modes are present. The
theory includes 5 C of freedom. Indeed, the l.h.s. of the
equations of motion for this theory is given by the sum of
the l.h.s. of the usual linearized Einstein equation (1.​14)
and the term arising from our mass term.
Taking the divergence of these equations, we find
, and after simple manipulations we arrive
at the constraints and , which allow to
rewrite the Lagrange equation in the standard Proca-like
form . So, we have five constraints, and
hence there are five degrees of freedom. Certainly, their
interpretation is an additional problem. Moreover, there is
one more difficulty related with this theory—its propagator
involves terms quadratically increasing with the momenta
in the UV limit, i.e., it displays the confinement-like
behaviour. From the formal viewpoint, the reason for it
consists in the fact that, since the Lagrangian is not gauge
invariant, the corresponding propagator, instead of the
standard transversal projector includes the
operator (see discussion in [52]). Besides of
this worsening the UV behaviour, the presence of the non-
transversal naturally implies in a singularity at ,
so, the zero mass limit of our massive gravity is not well
defined (moreover, if one compares the propagators of two
theories, it turns out to be that the analogue of the last
term in (1.​18) for the massive gravity carries the factor
instead of in (1.​18), which complicates the problem of
the limit of our theory even more). The fact that the
massless limit of our theory is ill-defined is referred as van
Dam-Veltman-Zakharov (vDVZ) discontinuity originally
discussed in [53, 54]. This discontinuity has been proved to
generate problems also within the parametrized post-
Newtonian (PPN) expansion [52] (we note that the weak
field gravitational potential in the theory displays the
standard form ).
One more difficulty with the massless limit of the
massive gravity has been noted in [52], namely, if we try to
obtain Stückelberg-like extension of our mass terms in
order to re-establish the gauge symmetry, so that, first, we
introduce the extra vector field replacing
so that the term (2.43) becomes
gauge invariant under transformations ,
, as a result, the action for the field of the
form

(2.44)

and now, in order to convert to a gauge field, we

perform one more Stückelberg-like extension
, as a result, we arrive at the graviton-scalar
mixing terms (we note that these
terms reproduce the linearized limit of some possible
galileons-gravity couplings, with playing the role of the
galileon, see the discussion in the Sect. 3.4). As it is
claimed in [52], this form of the mass terms for gravity can
be extended to a full-fledged gravity through adding terms
like , for a D-dimensional space-time, with
the contractions are performed with use of some nontrivial
background metric (we note that presence of the
second metric is rather characteristic for massive gravity
models, see also f.e. [56]). One can show that the static
spherically symmetric metric (3.​20) solves the equations of
motion, with the components of the metric tensor are
proportional to , where is a polynomial
function in 1/r.
From another side, in a nonlinear massive gravity there
are not five but six degrees of freedom, with the additional
one is a ghost usually referred as the Boulware-Deser (BD)
ghost [55]. To circumvent this problem, in [56] a bimetric
theory, involving, besides of the physical metric , the
additional non-dynamical one was proposed (see [57]
for a further development of this idea). The resulting action
represents itself as a sum of the usual Einstein-Hilbert
action and a some function of . It was shown in
[56] that in such theories, the arising of the extra mode is
avoided.
There are other approaches to the massive gravity as
well, some of them are presented in [58, 59]. Some
historical review on the problem of graviton mass, together
with related phenomenological estimations, also can be
found in [59]. Here, we discuss in more details one of the
possible scenarios where massive gravity can be
introduced, that is, the softly higher-derivative massive
gravity [60].
In that paper, the action (2.3), involving terms of the
second order in curvature, is extended by adding the
following non-local massive term:

(2.45)

where as usual, , and is the mass

function, with the choice , enforcing the mass term to
dominate in the infrared limit (or, as is the same, at large
distances), and L is the length scale. Actually, this term is
naturally applied within the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati (DGP)
braneworld scenario [61]. We note that this term can be
introduced in an arbitrary space-time dimension. One can
Another random document with
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worthwhile. To see and speak to Pretty Leyton in a crowded room
was really very comforting, sometimes—which was just as well,
since he was always in every room that happened to be crowded,
saying: ‘Isn’t it a marvellous party?’ He gave all his women friends
beautifully bound copies of Tristram Shandy, which he said was the
only book.”
And now—what shall I say? I could quote the processional of
admiring, envious and rapturous adjectives applied to Mr. Arlen’s
work. I could quote other notes of his fashionable progress as a
person as well as a writer; but it would be repetitious. Besides, you
will prefer to form your own adjectives and perfect your own legend;
which is right and proper, and ever so charming of you. Kindly note
that the correct name and address is Mr. Michael Arlen, 14, Queen
Street, Mayfair, London, W. 1. Ask to be put through to Grosvenor
2275. But only in the Season, only in the Season.

BOOKS BY MICHAEL ARLEN

1920 A London Venture

1921 The Romantic Lady
1923 “Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days
1924 These Charming People
1924 The Green Hat: A Romance for a Few People

SOURCES ON MICHAEL ARLEN

Review of These Charming People by Arthur Waugh in the Daily
Telegraph, London, for 6 July 1923.
Curtis Brown, Curtis Brown Ltd., 6, Henrietta Street, Covent
Garden, London, W. C. 2.
17. Palettes and Patterns in Prose and
Poetry
i
Was it Emerson who said of the poems by Emily Dickinson that
they were “poetry pulled up by the roots, with the earth and dew
clinging to them”? I can’t be sure, for someone has culpably made
off with my copy of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Ponkapog Papers, in
which there is a pleasant essay on Emily Dickinson. Aldrich, of
course, said in his meticulous way that poetry should not be pulled
up by the roots; but modern feeling does not agree with him, holding
the bit of earth and the sparkle of dewy freshness evidence
incontrovertible that the flower is authentic and not mere paper or
wax. Emily Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886, a recluse who in her
lifetime wrote over 600 poems, hardly any of which were published
until after her death. And then?
Ah, but the estimation in which she is held, and a sequence of
fame, steadily grows. Almost forty years after her death, she is more
read and more delighted in than ever. “A mystic akin only to
Emerson,” W. P. Dawson, the English critic, says in his own
anthology. “Among American poets I have named two—Poe and
Emily Dickinson.” And a reviewer for the London Spectator said not
long ago: “Mr. Conrad Aiken in his recent anthology of American
poets calls Emily Dickinson’s poetry ‘perhaps the finest by a woman
in the English language.’ I quarrel only with his ‘perhaps.’”
Splendid news, therefore, that we now have a new one-volume
edition of her work! The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
contains all the verse which appeared in Poems, First Series, in
Poems, Second Series, and in Poems, Third Series, and also those
in the book brought out as recently as 1914, The Single Hound. The
total body of Emily Dickinson’s work is therefore presented, and all in
a new and proper arrangement, making the edition definitive. Emily
Dickinson’s niece and biographer, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, has
written an introduction for the work.
Having begun, in spontaneity and pleasure, with poetry, let us stick
to it a while. Here are three more volumes by women poets, sisters,
the Brontës, no less. Clement K. Shorter has edited them and C. W.
Hatfield has provided the bibliographies and notes. They are The
Complete Poems—of Charlotte Brontë, of Anne Brontë, of Emily
Jane Brontë, respectively. Each is a first complete collection, and
each contains a large percentage of poems never before published. I
need not say anything of the romance investing the lives of these
three women. Shut in a lonely parsonage in bleak moorland country,
haunted by ill health and destined to die young, they made their lives
one of the most extraordinary adventures in the history of the literary
spirit. Their verse, of course, shows the Byronic influence.
The indefatigable J. C. Squire has been busy compiling an A Book
of American Verse with ingratiating results. Himself a poet, an editor
who selects new verse and a critic, Mr. Squire has ranged over the
whole field of American literature from its beginnings and has been
at once personal and catholic in his inclusions. His most recent
collection of his own work, Essays on Poetry, includes short papers
on Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, and
some others.
Walter de la Mare: A Biographical and Critical Study, by R. L.
Mégroz, is the first book devoted to the life and writings of this poet
and prose writer of such marked distinction. Mr. Mégroz says that the
purpose of his volume is “to show the poet of dream in a human light
and in relation to the rest of society.” It is difficult to think of a living
writer of more interest for such a study than the author of the
Memoirs of a Midget, the close friend of Rupert Brooke, and the poet
of happiest childhood as well as of soberly reflective and tranquil
age. Mr. Mégroz’s book has the charm of its subject, and more.
One need not be a professor or scholar in the technical sense to
write a good book on English literature, and the proof of it, if a fresh
one be needed, is T. Earle Welby’s A Popular History of English
Poetry. Mr. Welby is an amateur, unless his amateur standing may
have been impaired by his articles in the London Saturday Review
and his other book, a critical study of Swinburne. A Popular History
of English Poetry is said to be the only one-volume book of its sort,
but whether it is or not, it is remarkably welcome. Its survey runs
from Chaucer (there is even a prefatory chapter on pre-Chaucer) to
Meredith and Hardy and Masefield and de la Mare. And it deserves
the adjective in front of the word “History” in its title. Anyone who
knows or cares about poetry at all can read with delighted ease and
will learn something in every chapter. Mr. Welby has both a fertile
knowledge and a light touch. His judgments are neither vague
characterizations nor conventional utterances; he has taste and he
has an opinion, and he gives you each.

ii
To leave the poets for the moment but to keep in the sense of an
exquisite color and form: Echo de Paris, by Laurence Housman, is a
bit of severely ornamented reminiscence which I think of first when
now I think of decorative prose—not so much because of its own
brief perfection as because of its subject. Oscar Wilde’s influence is
not a negligible thing in a contemporary literature which embraces
Cabell, Hergesheimer, Elinor Wylie, Carl Van Vechten, and others,
both American and English, who value words somewhat as James
Huneker valued them, for their sound, shape, smell and taste. I take
from the London Times a description of Echo de Paris:
“At the end of September, 1899, three friends are sitting in a café
near the Place de l’Opera. They are awaiting a guest for luncheon,
and from their amicable chatter we learn that it is Wilde who is
expected. Presently he appears, and while they take their aperitifs
holds his audience with that marvelous conversation which long
before had made him legendary. It is substantially the record of an
actual conversation, Mr. Housman tells us, for he was the host on
this occasion. Apart from the actuality of the setting, he has imagined
a dramatic incident which he believes, though symbolical, will
represent the existing emotional situation. As Wilde talks, with an
apparent indifference to his personal disaster, another man is seen
coming along the street. He advances toward the group, all of whom
he knows well, especially Wilde, who befriended him before his
imprisonment, but, after clearly recognizing them, passes on without
a sign. Wilde continues to weave his unwritten stories; but he has
been deeply hurt and gracefully disentangles himself from a
luncheon which, faced with the spectators of his pain, would have
been more than even he could bear.
“The difficulty of producing a reasonable imitation of Wilde’s
conversation has been overcome so successfully that we sometimes
feel that one of his essays is being read by one of the characters in
his comedies—there is that combination of verbal wit and bold
intellectual paradox. In these pages we are made to feel something
of the reality on which his reputation was built.”
Judges so diverse as Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and
Carl Van Vechten have uttered words of extreme praise for Elinor
Wylie’s Jennifer Lorn. I don’t know of a recent work before which one
feels an equal impotence of the descriptive faculty. This novel of an
eighteenth century exquisite and his bride is as brightly enameled as
the period it deals with; every paragraph is lacquered. You have
perhaps stood long before some Eastern carpet with old rose,
cream, ivory and dark blue in enigmatical patterns, your eye
delighting in its intricacy. Have you tried afterward to tell someone
about it? Then, precisely, you know the difficulty of reporting Jennifer
Lorn. It is worth noting, though, that the novel does not merely
purvey an eighteenth century story; it seeks to purvey it, with
delicate, inner irony in the eighteenth century manner. The adroit
printing and binding in simulation of an eighteenth century format
was inevitable, perhaps; but it was not so inevitable that it should be
so delightfully well-done.
An autobiography would seem to belong in Chapter 12 of this
book; I saved out Thomas Burke’s autobiographical volume because
the spirit of it, and the color of his writing, seemed to place it here.
He calls it The Wind and the Rain; it is the most intimate book he has
ever written, and the best since Limehouse Nights (from some
standpoints it is better than that work). In The Wind and the Rain,
Thomas Burke returns to Limehouse, telling of his boyhood and
youth, of the squalor of his early years, of the loneliness and hunger
of his City days, of the moments of spiritual exaltation that came to
him at night in London streets. He recalls his friendship with old
Quong Lee, a storekeeper in the Causeway; his one-room house
with an Uncle; his adventures in the kitchen of the Big House at
Greenwich where his Uncle worked; his rapturous hours in the
street; his four wretched years in an orphanage; his running away
and being sheltered by the queer woman in the queer house; his first
job; his friendship with a girl of thirteen and its abrupt end; his
discovery of literature and pictures and music; his first short story
accepted when he was still an office-boy; and then his first success.
This somewhat long recitation speaks for itself and will kindle the
imagination of anyone who ever read Thomas Burke or saw Griffith’s
film, “Broken Blossoms.”
Hugh Walpole’s critical study of Anthony Trollope is welcome both
because a good account of Trollope is needed and because
Walpole’s own work used to be likened to that of the author of
Barchester Towers. I believe the comparison is pretty well obsolete—
Mr. Walpole is now rather the object than the subject of comparisons
—but those who know Walpole best have long known of his very
definite interest in Trollope and his gradual acquisition of materials
for a survey of Trollope’s work. The Anthony Trollope by Walpole is a
book to set beside Frank Swinnerton’s Gissing and R. L. Stevenson;
we have a right to hope that the fashion will spread among the
novelists; and I should like nothing better than to record a similar
book by Arnold Bennett, even if, as is very probable, he would
consent to do one only on a French subject—in which case he would
probably select Stendhal.
But this leads directly to the whole subject of literary discussions. It
is too big to deal with here, and yet I can’t drop it without some
reference to the two most provocative books of the sort in recent
memory. Dr. Joseph Collins is a well-known New York neurologist
whose literary hobby has been cultivated in private during a number
of years. It was the rich pungency of his conversation which first led
to insistences that he write a book about authors. He did. The Doctor
Looks at Literature, with its praise of Proust and its incisiveness
regarding D. H. Lawrence, its appreciation of Katherine Mansfield
and its penetrating study of James Joyce, was something new,
sparkling, resonant and simply not to be missed. Dr. Collins’s second
book, Taking the Literary Pulse, is as strongly brewed and as well-
flavored. I find it even more interesting because it deals to a much
greater extent with American writers—Sherwood Anderson, Edith
Wharton, Amy Lowell and others—and because of the
uncompromised utterance in the first chapter on literary censorship,
a subject which most discussion merely muddles.

iii
Of collections of essays, I have no hesitation in putting first the
anthology by F. H. Pritchard, Essays of To-Day. Not only are the
inclusions amply representative of the best work by contemporary
English essayists, but to my mind Mr. Pritchard has supplied, in his
Introduction, one of the most inspiring essays of the lot. He writes,
naturally, about the essay as a form of art, and shows quite simply
how the essay and the lyric poem are “the most intimate revelations
of personality that we have in literature.” His wisdom is equaled by a
power of expression which can best be intimated by quoting a few of
his words regarding the lyric:
“Ordered by the strict limitations of rhythm, and obedient to the
recurrences of rime and meter, the unruly ideas are fashioned into a
lyric, just as scattered particles, straying here and there, are drawn
together and fused into crystalline beauty. The difference, indeed, is
one of temperature”—the difference between lyric and essay. “The
metal bar, cold or lukewarm, will do anywhere, but heat it to melting-
point and you must confine it within the rigid limits of the mold or see
it at length but an amorphous splash at your feet.”
Then follow thirty-four selections, each prefaced by a short
biographical note on its author. Youth and old age, reminiscences,
the spirit of place and of holiday, and various interrelations between
life and letters are the subjects. Kenneth Grahame, Joseph Conrad,
Maurice Hewlett, E. V. Lucas, Robert Lynd, W. B. Yeats, Hilaire
Belloc, Rupert Brooke, C. E. Montague, E. Temple Thurston, Alice
Meynell, George Santayana, Gilbert K. Chesterton and Edmund
Gosse are some of the writers who achieve inclusion; and the variety
of the essays is great—irony, humor, romantic feeling, delight in
places and sadness all have their moment.
Such a collection, one feels, cannot but lead the reader to books
by some of the authors represented; and I hope such readers will not
miss Robert Lynd’s The Blue Lion. Here are some chapters dealing
apparently with children, birds, flowers, taverns and the like, but
animated by that interest in, sympathy for and appreciation of human
nature which is the field of the essay’s most fertile cultivation.
It is, to a great extent, the field which Robert Cortes Holliday has
occupied himself with since the day of his Walking-Stick Papers; and
while the title of his new book is Literary Lanes and Other Byways,
the “other byways” are frequently the most engaging to tread. Mr.
Holliday, for example, has been interviewing the ancient waiters on
the subject of the golden years at a lost Delmonico’s; and he has
also become an authority on nightwear. But there is plenty of contact
between life and literature in Literary Lanes. One essay is devoted to
the subject of the vamp in literature; another to books as presents;
another harvests bons mots from the inner circles of celebrated wits;
“and,” as Mr. Holliday would say, “and so on.”
Stephen McKenna’s By Intervention of Providence is a felicitous
blend of diary, essay and short story, written by this novelist during
an extended visit to the West Indies. The atmosphere of the West
India islands is conveyed with some care, while the digressions to
the essay or the short story are anecdotal, philosophical, and
frequently humorous. “From day to day,” Mr. McKenna explains, “I
set down whatever fancy tempted me to write. The result can only be
called ‘Essays’ in the Johnsonian sense of that word. I desire no
more accurate definition of what is in part a series of letters, in part a
journal, in part vagrant reminiscences, in part idle reflection, in part
stories which I do not ask the reader to believe.” But the potpourri,
however unusual, will be welcomed alike by the traveler and the
arm-chair tourist.
 iv
The return to poetry must not be deferred longer. And first let me
speak of John Farrar’s book of verse, The Middle Twenties, which is
more than usually interesting because it is the first collection of his
serious work in a half dozen years. There has been none since his
book, Forgotten Shrines. I do not forget Songs for Parents, but that
is somewhat of a piece with his book of plays for children, The Magic
Sea Shell, and it is likely it would continue popular for this reason
alone. His work as an editor and an anthologist, with many other
activities, have tended to obscure Farrar the poet, and have certainly
taken time and energy the poet could ill spare. But I know that much
of the hardest work Mr. Farrar has done these past few years has
been upon the verse in The Middle Twenties. The result ought to
satisfy him, though probably it won’t; he is not easily pleased with his
own work. But all the poems in The Middle Twenties keep to a high
level and the volume has more than variety, it has positive and
effective contrast. Whether he is most successful in the “Amaryllis”
group, gay and rollicking, or in the savage pain and passion of “The
Squaw” is for the reader’s own decision. But from the flaming “Ego,”
the opening poem, to the fine understanding of such work as “War
Women” the book affords a range of subject, treatment, and
emotional feeling which leaves no reader indifferent.
Nellie Burget Miller’s In Earthen Bowls explains its title in these
lines which open the book:

So here we have our treasure in an earthen bowl,

Distorted, marred, and set to common use:
And some will never see beyond the form of clay,
And some will stoop to peer within and softly say,
“There is a wondrous radiance prisoned there,
And I heard the stir of an angel’s wing.”

Such a volume makes its candid appeal to the audience—very

large—which asks insistently for poems of a simple sincerity and a
direct relation to daily lives. Their lives are the earthen bowls in
which they want to be able to see the suggestion of something
radiant and feel the stir of something divine. In the fifty-seven poems
in her book, Mrs. Miller has not tried to build an imaginary world, but
has appealed to the love of nature, and to the feelings of happiness
and grief, for her lyrical expression. The evidence of her success has
been recorded in several ways. She has, for one thing, been made
the chairman of the literary division of the National Federation of
Women’s Clubs. She has also been chosen poet laureate of her
State, Colorado.
Essentially the same qualities of mood and appeal characterize
Martha Haskell Clark’s book, The Home Road. Mrs. Clark has been
a contributor of verse to Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines and to
several of the enormously popular women’s magazines, so-called.
Her poems are concerned, as her title indicates, chiefly with the
longing, often wistful and sometimes delightful, for an old home or
fireside, old friends and holidays and memories. The language is as
simple as the feeling. Curtis Hidden Page, professor of English at
Dartmouth and compiler of English Poets of the Nineteenth Century,
writes the preface to The Home Road.
Here is an anthology of recitations! Grace Gaige’s Recitations—
Old and New for Boys and Girls seems to me of more than ordinary
interest, because the author is the buyer of books for one of the
largest stores in the world. It is a store of so widespread a reputation
that one thinks of it as constantly creating book readers from the
mere fact of its having a book department. And certainly Miss Gaige
is in an unequaled position to know what, in the way of a book,
people want. Well, she does. And having found no present-day book
that quite met the problem, she has made one. Her Recitations—Old
and New for Boys and Girls has a foreword by Christopher Morley
and contains poems dealing with every imaginable subject. They are
divided into sections in a natural grouping: poems about and for
children, poems about fairies, about birds and other animals, about
flowers and seasons; humorous poems, patriotic poems, holiday
poems—I can’t remember them all. But despite the classification, the
range is so great that over 200 poems had to go under
“Miscellaneous.” You are sure to find it there, if nowhere else!
 How were they chosen? With just three things in mind, (1) their
interest, (2) their proved popularity, and (3) their special fitness for
recitation. The triple crown of the collection is the threefold index, of
authors, of titles, and of first lines. And although people want poems
for recitation, and though these poems are for recitation, there is
nothing to debar this mammoth anthology as a book for reading. As
such, it will be found a work of the utmost satisfaction.
A book that particularly deserves inclusion in this chapter is the
new illustrated edition of Jay William Hudson’s novel, Abbé Pierre.
The great success of this charming story is of the kind that goes
steadily on, year after year; and while our present-day taste is rather
against the illustration of novels, a book of this character (like David
Harum) can be greatly enhanced by the right pictures. Mr. Hudson
has got exactly the thing, I think, in the sixteen pencil drawings and
the endpapers by Mr. Edwin Avery Park. This artist will also become
familiar to readers by his work in collaboration with Maitland Belknap
in Princeton Sketches. Mr. Park traveled in the parts of France where
the scenes of Abbé Pierre are laid and has caught both the spirit and
character of place and tale. His drawings have been rather carefully
reproduced as half-tones, and with other details of the book’s new
dress, make a volume of a sort in entire keeping with the novel’s
quality.
18. Coming!—Courtney Ryley Cooper
—Coming!
i
What I need at the moment is not a chapter but a billboard on
which to paste with great splashy gestures a three-sheet
announcement: “Coming!—The Literary Lochinvar—Coming!” Both
words and pictures—yes, and muted notes from the steam calliope
—are requisite to herald adequately the author of Under the Big Top.
If I tell the story of Courtney Ryley Cooper, fiction, even his own
fiction, will seem colorless beside it. Therefore read no further. The
lights are off and a beam flung from the projection room high
overhead shows us——
Scene. Large white canvas mushrooms growing closely together
and obviously attracting swarms of the human ant. Animals in gaudy
cages, the living skeleton, lemonade, spangles and paper hoops.
Close-up. Fifteen-year-old boy, at once timid and bold, interviewing
the master of destinies. Caption: “Boy, water the elephants!”
Scene. Amphitheatre within the largest of the tents. Several
thousand faces that are all one face and that have even less
significance than one face and that emit a crackling, collective
sound. Clowns, masked by perpetually surprised looks painted on
noses, mouths and eyebrows, in ballooning white costumes, rolling
and tumbling about the arena. Thwack! Close-up. Fifteen-year-old
ecstatic over the time of his life, working hard. Caption: “Spare the
slap-stick and spoil the child.”
Scene. Office of the Denver Post, twelve years later. Enter Buffalo
Bill, white hair pigtailed and everything. He strides up to the city
editor. Caption: “Whar’s that reporter fellow——”
 Flash. “Film not broken, but we have just been informed that all
motion picture rights in the career of Courtney Ryley Cooper are
reserved to Mr. Cooper. Please keep your seats.”

ii
He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, 31 October 1886, the son of
Baltimore Thomas Cooper and Catherine (Grenolds) Cooper. He is a
descendant of the Calverts, Lords of Baltimore, and of other settlers
of Maryland and Virginia. He ran away from school in Kansas City to
become water-boy and clown in a circus. He also became an actor,
bill distributor, property man and song and dance artist with bad
repertory companies playing “East Lynne,” “In Old Kentucky,” “The
James Boys in Missouri” and other classics of the road.
He has been a newsboy, a trucker, a glove salesman, a
monologist in vaudeville, a circus press agent, a newspaper man,
and general manager of the world’s second largest circus.
He began writing at 24, a play, “the world’s worst play,” he says. It
was produced in Kansas City “and I had to sit and watch the darned
thing for two weeks.” Then he began to write magazine stories. So
great has been his output that at least five pen names have been
necessary. They are Barney Furey, William O. Grenolds, Jack
Harlow, Frederick Tierney and Leonard B. Hollister. He has written
as much as 45,000 words of fiction in three days—or days and
nights. As a newspaper man he has written eight columns (1,200
words to the column) in two hours. For such excesses he naturally
pays in an inability to walk, eat or sleep for some immediate time
afterward. It might be supposed that the work so turned out would be
mere machine-made stuff, but this is not true. However, the ability to
write at such speed has necessitated a small staff to gather the
writer’s material.
There are several reasons why Mr. Cooper could never gather it
all himself. He married, in 1916, Genevieve R. Furey, of Los
Angeles, and they have a pleasant home in Idaho Springs, Colorado.
Mr. Cooper gets his recreation in the mountains round about. But the
stuff for the hundreds of stories he has written of circus life and
jungle animal life cannot be renewed except from elsewhere. It
cannot be renewed and added to sufficiently except—almost literally
—from everywhere. After all, Mr. Cooper has contributed stories to
more than half a hundred magazines. And if he were to stop writing
to gather material——!
“I have a little circus all my own,” he explains. He knows nearly
everything that is happening in all the big shows. He keeps up an
uninterrupted correspondence with circus people and he has five
persons on his payroll at all times. One is a man who makes a
specialty of circus pictures. Another is a lion trainer who has trained
as many as thirty lions in one den. Whenever he has some unusual
incident of animal behavior to report, he writes to Cooper. A third
member of the little staff is an all-round animal man, menagerie
superintendent and “bullman.” A fourth is a highly educated woman
with ten years’ experience in training lions, tigers, leopards and
elephants. Mr. Cooper pays her a salary and she takes
“assignments,” just as if she were a reporter—which, in fact, she is in
this work. She is a reporter on animals, their training, and their
characteristics. The fifth employee is a circus clown who sends a
regular monthly letter reporting things that happen under the big top.
There is, besides, a large number of volunteer correspondents,
friends of long standing.
Mr. Cooper has used his material both directly, in the form of
articles, and in stories. While he was on his way from clown to
general manager of the circus, he became deeply interested in
jungle animals and discovered a great many human traits (or traits
parallel, if you prefer) in them. He himself, it must be remembered,
has been in the training dens with leopards, lions, tigers and pumas;
and he has been in with as many as six lions and tigers at one time.
He looks, in certain poses, remarkably like Eric von Stroheim, and
the camera sometimes brings out the multitude of his freckles. He is
bald and enjoys baldness. Better company is not to be had, and this
is only partly due to the innumerable anecdotes at his command.
Many of these grow out of his association with Buffalo Bill, whose
personal secretary he was for a while and whose biographer (with
Buffalo Bill’s widow, Mrs. W. F. Cody) he became. There is, for
example, the story of the time when Cooper contracted with a
clipping bureau for newspaper notices. They were to be ten cents
each. They arrived—a bale—and with them a bill for $134.90. With a
single exception, they consisted of 1,348 clippings about the Buffalo
baseball team, which was much to the fore owing to the temporary
existence of the Federal League.
Cooper also told this story at a Dutch Treat Club luncheon in New
York:
“Colonel Cody arrived home unexpectedly early one morning.
Going to his wife’s bedroom window he tapped on the glass, calling:
‘It’s all right; let me in.’ ‘Go away,’ said Mrs. Cody. ‘This is Buffalo
Bill’s house, and I’m his wife, and I can shoot, too.’ Buffalo Bill, sore,
remounted his horse and rode off to a neighboring saloon.
Eventually he returned home, galloping up the driveway and on to
the veranda of the house, letting out Whoops the While. As he
reached the door a gentle voice greeted him from behind it: ‘Is that
you, Willie dear?’”

iii
In 1918 Mr. Cooper enlisted as a private in the United States
Marines. Very shortly he was commissioned as a second lieutenant
and sent to France to collate historical matter for the Marine Corps.
He has a very exceptional talent for handling people in masses,
and has sometimes been requisitioned by motion picture people and
others who had spectacles to produce. As the talent is coupled with
a talent for creative organization at least equal, the life of a writer
represents a deliberate sacrifice of money on Cooper’s part. For
example:
Wild West shows, rodeos and bucking horse contests are one of
his hobbies. A few years ago he ran the first Annual Round-up at
Colorado Springs. In three days the show took in $19,800 gate
money. And the whole show, from the announcement, building of
grandstands to seat 8,000 persons, hiring of cowboys, wild horses,
bucking broncos, steers for bulldogging, advertising and everything
else, was put on in less than three weeks. Overtures piled in on
Cooper to go into the business in other places. In the end, he
refused contracts for $150,000 for two years’ work.

iv
His books have been of two principal kinds, novels of the West
and the two volumes, Under the Big Top and Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’
Everything! that spring from the circus. The novels are The Cross-
Cut, The White Desert, and The Last Frontier, in that order. Are they
simply the usual “Westerns”? No. There is in The Cross-Cut that
quality of humor, that enjoyment of a capital hoax, which first cut out
from the stampeding herd of Western stories Owen Wister’s The
Virginian. Almost everyone, recalling Mr. Wister’s novel, thinks of the
opening scene in which the cowboys, like Little Buttercup in Mr.
Gilbert’s “Pinafore,” “mixed those babies up.” That affair, so
refreshingly different in its realism and sense of scandalous fun from
the sentimental heroics of other Western tales, is easily recalled
when most other incidents of The Virginian are forgotten. Similarly
one recalls with fresh amusement the ruse whereby ’Arry ’Arkins got
the Blue Poppy mine unwatered. Messrs. Fairchild and ’Arkins had
very little capital; but by a convincing effect of drowning in the mine,
the whole community was stirred to rescue the presumed corpse of
’Arkins; machinery that the two men could not have hired was set to
work pumping, and by the time the hoax was revealed, the mine was
dry.
The White Desert has nothing to do with sand and alkali but is a
story of the bleak, white stretches of the Continental Divide, where
the world is a world of precipices, blue-green ice, and snow-spray
carried on the beating wings of never-resting gales. It is the tale of a
lumber camp and of a highly dramatic, last ditch struggle. Mr. Cooper
admits that the first chapters were from an experience of his own. On
the Berthoud Pass, 11,300 feet high, his speedster broke down. Now
safety speed on the roads thereabouts is possibly fifteen miles an
hour. The grades sometimes run as high as eighteen and twenty per
cent. With no windshield, no gears to aid his brakes, no goggles and
a sprained steering gear, Mr. Cooper was towed on these mountain
roads by a largely liquored gentleman in a truck at a speed of
twenty-five miles an hour. Mr. Cooper was bald before this
happened....
Essentially, The Cross-Cut and The White Desert are stories; The
Last Frontier, with no sacrifice of story interest, can stake a claim of
more importance. Like certain novels of Emerson Hough’s[82] and
Hal G. Evarts’s, this is an accurate and alive presentation of
American history in the guise of fiction. The period is 1867-68 when,
as an aftermath of the Civil War, many impoverished families sought
the unsettled frontier lands. The Kansas-Pacific Railway, a link
between East and West, was under construction, its every mile
contested by the Indians. It was the period when Buffalo Bill made
his reputation as a buffalo hunter and Indian scout; when General
Custer nearly wore himself out hunting Indians; when the Battle of
Beecher’s Island aroused the nation. Buffalo Bill, Custer, and the
building of the railroad are the true subjects of this fine romance
which ends when the great stampede has failed. “The buffalo were
gone. Likewise the feathered beings who had striven to use them as
a bulwark and had failed—enfiladed by scouts, volleyed by cavalry,
their bodies were strewn in the valley with the carcasses of the
buffalo.” Within months Custer was to come back, and in triumph.
The “golden-haired general” was to ride to the battle of Washita “at
the head of the greatest army of troops ever sent against the red
man.... There would be other frontiers—true. But they would be
sectional things, not keystones, such as this had been.”
These novels, in their order, mark a growth in the writer’s stature;
and Mr. Cooper, like others who show growth, has humility as well as
ambition. The thing he has in mind to do, possibly in his next novel,
is more difficult than anything he has done—an attempt to take a few
contemporary lives and view them in the perspective that history
affords. This, of course, is very hard to do. Certainly Sinclair Lewis
did not do it in Main Street, and no amount of exact, faithful, realistic
detail accomplishes it. It can only be done by simplifying one’s
material so that a few humble people are seen as typifying human
endeavor. But if the effort is successful, the result will mean as much
in one century as in another, and the work will live.

v
Mr. Cooper’s two books based on the circus accomplish
something that no one else, so far as I know, has even attempted.
They make a permanent and fascinating record of a truly American
institution. Under the Big Top presents the circus as a whole,
although five of the eleven chapters are concerned with the circus
animals. Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything is wholly about the
menagerie.
The first of these books is a curious illustration of the breach
ordinarily existing between literature and life. Although, in the
complexities of a surface civilization, the circus may hold less
significance for Americans today than fifty or forty or even twenty
years ago, most of us were brought up to go to the circus. Or, at any
rate, went. The formative influence of the circus on American
character is incalculably great. Yet neither literature nor formal
education took any cognizance of the circus tent. Public officials, as
Mr. Cooper points out, very generally took into consideration the
educational value of circus animals when fixing license fees. But that
was about all the notice of value the circus got. Where were books
on the circus? When was the circus reckoned with by the
professional analysts of American character? How far has present-
day American advertising acknowledged its immense debt to the
traveling show? What Matthew Arnold or James Bryce coming to our
shores to examine American character and lacking, possibly, the
wisdom of the serpent acquired the Wisdom of the circus? And our
psychologists busied with delicate tests on the nerve-endings of
frogs; were they dumb-bells so long? They were. They went not to
the circus, the sluggards; they examined not its ways.
Yet it would be true to say that the circus is the one most typical
American institution. Between the American circus and the traveling
shows of other lands no comparison is possible. In size, in variety, in
achievements of audacity, devotion and courage, the American big
tent show has no rival. It is, to begin with, playing around in a country
which is to most other countries as a ten-acre field is to a city lot. Its
self-reliance must be complete. Its morale, especially in the days of
its greatest importance, has had to be high and unwavering; for
otherwise-excellent people have been its unrelenting foes. At the
same time the circus has been something much more than a
spectacle; frequently it has been a coöperative enterprise. Mr.
Cooper gives some idea of the innumerable occasions on which the
American small boy, judiciously and fairly rewarded with a free ticket,
has pulled the circus out of some insuperable physical difficulty. The
circus was the original discoverer of the most important element in
American psychology, the love of bigness and display, the admiration
for achievement in size. It was the circus which first put in firm
practice the important principle of human nature which time merely
refines upon: the desire to be bunked: and the circus drew the
correct line between bunk and bunco and with the fewest exceptions
steered clear of bunco.
Now in Under The Big Top, Mr. Cooper, who naturally knows
circuses, gayly gives the whole show away—a process which a good
show can come out of with colors flying. And the circus does. The
gist of the book, the real why of the circus, will be found in that
rousing final chapter written upon the text:
RAIN OR SHINE
THE WORLD’S GREATEST SHOW
WILL POSITIVELY APPEAR
Here are stories of that ultimate sheer persistence which is the
spirit of the circus and, pretty nearly, the history of the nation to
which it belongs.

vi
The chapters on animals in Under the Big Top led directly to Mr.
Cooper’s Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything, which is the menagerie
inside out. In the course of long study of caged and captive jungle
creatures, and aided by the continuous study of his staff-helpers, Mr.
Cooper has found no human emotion which these animals do not
exhibit at some time or other in appropriate circumstances. “I have
seen jealousy, insanity, hallucination, the highest kind of love
including mother love, the fiercest brand of hate, trickery, cunning
and revenge. I have seen gratitude. The only desire I will exclude as
not being common to humans and animals is the desire for money.
There is a corresponding animal desire, however. It is horse meat.
Horse meat is the currency of the animal kingdom.”[83]
The extraordinary instance of Casey, a giant, black-faced
chimpanzee[84] captured in infancy in the Cape Lopez district of
Africa, has suggested to Mr. Cooper that something most remarkably
approaching a man could be bred from a monkey in as few as four
generations. Not a physical likeness, but mental, is the prospect.
Enough apes of Casey’s type would be necessary to avoid
inbreeding, and the first generation born in captivity would have to be
subjected to wholly human contacts.[85] About 150 years would be
required for the experiment.
But Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything is a book of fact, not of theories.
It is most valuable, perhaps, in its contrast between the old and new
methods of animal training. Mr. Cooper shows in the first chapter the
transformation that has come about:
“The circus animal trainer of today is not chosen for his brutality, or
his cunning, or his so-called bravery. He is hired because he has
studied and knows animals—even to talking their various
‘languages.’ There are few real animal trainers who cannot gain an
answer from their charges, talking to them as the ordinary person
talks to a dog and receiving as intelligent attention. Animal men have
learned that the brute isn’t any different from the human; the surest
way to make him work is to pay him for his trouble. In the steel arena
today ... the animals are just so many hired hands. When they do
their work, they get their pay.... The present-day trainer doesn’t cow
the animal or make it afraid of him.... The first thing to be eliminated
is not fear on the part of the trainer, but on the part of the animal!...
Sugar for dogs, carrots for elephants, fish for seals, stale bread for